Experience Report on the 3D-EM Course "Single Particle Analysis"
19.-23.02.2007, Centro Nacional de Biotecnologia, CSIC, Madrid, Spain
Course leader: Prof. Jose L. Carrascosa
The 3D-EM Course "Single Particle Analysis" of this year was held from February 19th to 23rd in Centro Nacional de Biotecnologia in Madrid. The organization of the course, especially the lodging and food, was very good for our 9 students from different countries and research fields. We always felt excited in both theoretical and practical sessions of the course because the lecturers were competent and patient.
As we know, the image processing is one of the most important steps in Single Particle Analysis. So the main aim of this course is to let us know why and how to do the image processing by using X-windows based microscopy image processing package (XMIPP). XMIPP, introduced to the electron microscopy field ten years ago, is a specialized suit of image processing programs, primarily aimed at obtaining the 3D reconstruction of biological specimens from large sets of projection images acquired by transmission electron microscopy (Sorzano et al. J. Struct. Biol. 2004, 148(2):194-204). New methodologies for the analysis of single-particle projection images have been added to classification, contrast transfer function correction, angular assignment, 3D reconstruction, reconstruction of crystals, etc. During the course, it was also shown how to combine the data from EM and X-ray.
We are looking forward to use XMIPP in our Single Particle Analysis in the future.
Dr. HongMei HAN
- Laboratoire d'analyse ultrastructurale -
Universite de Lausanne
CH-1015 Lausanne
Switzerland